Tatami Galaxy Episode #04

Once more unto the breach as we follow another path for the nameless college student.

What They SayA lowly college student seeking more out of life signs on as a disciple to a madman who's wanted by the library police. His first assignment: accompany the girl of his dreams on a quest to attain a mystical toilet brush.

The Review!Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)Tatami Galaxy moves right along in its fourth episode by being predictably unpredictable. The reboot of sorts that occurs in each episode now has our nameless college student starting all over again and falling for some flyers that has him drawn into a strange group. That group is led by a master who takes him on as an unwilling disciple through which they do all sorts of strange and pointless things, arguing throughout the night about boobs, drinking heavily and so forth. The added strangeness to the story is that the Master is actively wanted by the Library Police and his disciples help in making sure that he's not caught.

Our student's life takes several unusual turns as part of his Master's training and the final exam for him involves finding a mystical toilet brush made from special material not seen in decades due to concerns it would put certain businesses out of business. There's a little flashback that covers its origins for the material and so forth, but it's just another strange and unusual thread with no real meaning. So our student heads off to search for it since they're still being made in secret and he ends up gaining the help of the girl of his dreams with Akashi joining the episode. The two spend a fair bit of time together searching for it, though she tends to take the lead on it, and eventually they do find the brush for Master Higuchi.

The show then goes essentially of the rails at this point with a lot of nonsensical material that doesn't exactly click together well as it adjusts characters and relationships as seen from the previous episode. And saying this show is nonsensical after seeing the first three episodes says a lot. There's a lot going on in the second half of the episode as everything starts to collapse around the student, but it doesn't connect together well in a way that works but rather has you looking at the episode time to see how much is left. It tries to replicate parts of what we've seen in the previous episodes as it wants to bind it all together, but it fails to do so in a coherent enough way to make it... enjoyable.

In Summary:When my favorite moment of the episode is when the ending credits comes up and I get the really neat animation and music, I know I'm in trouble. Tatami Galaxy started off with some real promise and an intriguing idea and then it started to reboot itself with variations on a theme playing through. Aspects of it are still intriguing but it's now starting to wear out its welcome. The overly fast speech, the reboots, the nonsensical nature of large chunks of each episode was cute and intriguing at first but the ties that are supposed to hold it all together as a cohesive whole simply don't appear to be there. When a show starts to get frustrating, you know it's just not working for you.